The Kentucky media catch Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes fleeing from reporters who want to know why the candidate hawking the war on women turned a blind eye toward workplace harassment in her own workplace.

[...]

Next, the folks at the National Republican Senatorial Committee are blasting out an e-mail telling the press that it started looking at the pay rates in offices of incumbent red-state Democratic senators. You guessed it:

It turns out President Obama isn’t the only hypocritical Democrat, in fact Senate Democrats have their own problems when it comes to equal pay. We pulled the official payroll records of various offices and calculated the average pay for men and women in each office for the most recent 6 month period available. Since some employees only worked a portion of the six month period, we calculated how much each person was paid per day in order to give an accurate representation.

But perhaps the biggest news is the hypocrisy on gender pay equity at the White House itself.

The pay gap among women in the White House is more than twice as large as the average in the nation’s capital.

While female White House staffers earn about 88 cents for every dollar men in the White House make, women in the District earn about 95 cents for every dollar a men make, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s a 12-cent pay gap at the White House compared to a five-cent pay gap in the District of Columbia.

The metric used to derive both pay gaps is the same the government has used to arrive at the 77-cent national average.

Nevertheless, White House press secretary Jay Carney spent this week arguing that there is no pay discrimination at the White House.

“It is absolutely true that there is equal pay for equal work at the White House,” Carney said Tuesday.

When asked how the White House adopted that position while continuing to use the 77 cent statistic to impugn the rest of the country to the point of signing executive orders and pushing legislation aimed at correcting the stat, Carney responded, “if you want to compare metrics, we’re doing better.”

It's amazing how the White House has tapped into this "77 cents earned by women for every dollar earned by men" factoid and turned it into and fake crusade. As Glenn Kessler explained in giving two Pinocchios to Obama's claim, that figure is extremely misleading - and deliberately so by the president.

Since women in general work fewer hours than men in a year, the statistics used by the White House may be less reliable for examining the key focus of the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act — wage discrimination. For instance, annual wage figures do not take into account the fact that teachers — many of whom are women — have a primary job that fills nine months out of the year. The weekly wage is more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but it does not include as many income categories.

June O’Neill, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who has been a critic of the 77-cent statistic, has noted that the wage gap is affected by a number of factors, including that the average woman has less work experience than the average man and that more of the weeks worked by women are part-time rather than full-time. Women also tend to leave the work force for periods in order to raise children, seek jobs that may have more flexible hours but lower pay and choose careers that tend to have lower pay.

Indeed, BLS data show that women who do not get married have virtually no wage gap; they earn 96 cents for every dollar a man makes.

Funny how Obama sort of forgets to mention that last stat, eh?

I wonder how much longer the White House will continue trying to push this non-issue. Probably as long as the gullible and stupid continue to believe it.

The Kentucky media catch Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes fleeing from reporters who want to know why the candidate hawking the war on women turned a blind eye toward workplace harassment in her own workplace.

[...]

Next, the folks at the National Republican Senatorial Committee are blasting out an e-mail telling the press that it started looking at the pay rates in offices of incumbent red-state Democratic senators. You guessed it:

It turns out President Obama isn’t the only hypocritical Democrat, in fact Senate Democrats have their own problems when it comes to equal pay. We pulled the official payroll records of various offices and calculated the average pay for men and women in each office for the most recent 6 month period available. Since some employees only worked a portion of the six month period, we calculated how much each person was paid per day in order to give an accurate representation.

But perhaps the biggest news is the hypocrisy on gender pay equity at the White House itself.

The pay gap among women in the White House is more than twice as large as the average in the nation’s capital.

While female White House staffers earn about 88 cents for every dollar men in the White House make, women in the District earn about 95 cents for every dollar a men make, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s a 12-cent pay gap at the White House compared to a five-cent pay gap in the District of Columbia.

The metric used to derive both pay gaps is the same the government has used to arrive at the 77-cent national average.

Nevertheless, White House press secretary Jay Carney spent this week arguing that there is no pay discrimination at the White House.

“It is absolutely true that there is equal pay for equal work at the White House,” Carney said Tuesday.

When asked how the White House adopted that position while continuing to use the 77 cent statistic to impugn the rest of the country to the point of signing executive orders and pushing legislation aimed at correcting the stat, Carney responded, “if you want to compare metrics, we’re doing better.”

It's amazing how the White House has tapped into this "77 cents earned by women for every dollar earned by men" factoid and turned it into and fake crusade. As Glenn Kessler explained in giving two Pinocchios to Obama's claim, that figure is extremely misleading - and deliberately so by the president.

Since women in general work fewer hours than men in a year, the statistics used by the White House may be less reliable for examining the key focus of the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act — wage discrimination. For instance, annual wage figures do not take into account the fact that teachers — many of whom are women — have a primary job that fills nine months out of the year. The weekly wage is more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but it does not include as many income categories.

June O’Neill, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who has been a critic of the 77-cent statistic, has noted that the wage gap is affected by a number of factors, including that the average woman has less work experience than the average man and that more of the weeks worked by women are part-time rather than full-time. Women also tend to leave the work force for periods in order to raise children, seek jobs that may have more flexible hours but lower pay and choose careers that tend to have lower pay.

Indeed, BLS data show that women who do not get married have virtually no wage gap; they earn 96 cents for every dollar a man makes.

Funny how Obama sort of forgets to mention that last stat, eh?

I wonder how much longer the White House will continue trying to push this non-issue. Probably as long as the gullible and stupid continue to believe it.